Conventionally, an image forming apparatus such as an electrophotographic copier forms an image on a paper through a cyclic process involving charging, exposure, development, transfer and fixing. Moreover, the image forming apparatus is maintained by a service person, who is ingenerated of an abnormality in the image forming apparatus by the user by telephone when the abnormality occurs and then goes to the place where the apparatus is installed to confirm the condition. Moreover, each service person takes charge of the maintenance of a plurality of image forming apparatuses.
In the case where a plurality of image forming apparatuses are maintained, in order to acquire various data of each image forming apparatus so as to get statistical information, the following method is provided according to which each image forming apparatus is connected with a network, the data of the image forming apparatus is sent to a server connected with the network, and the information statistically calculated in the server is browsed using a browser.
However, the image forming apparatus and the apparatus for information browse must be connected with the network. Moreover, there are still a great many offline (not connected with a communication line such as the Internet) machines on the market functioning as image forming apparatuses to be maintained. In addition, there are also plenty of machines (referred hereinafter to as machine in offline state for the sake of convenience) which provide no machine information for the reason of security even they can be connected with a communication line such as the Internet.
Thus, a method is expected by which the machine information of a machine in offline state can be collected and a proper analysis processing can be performed based on the machine information collected to maintain an image forming apparatus. Moreover, the method is also expected to provide the same maintenance on various offline information processing apparatuses in addition to image forming apparatuses.